Passers-by in North Korea’s capital city of Pyongyang smoke cigarettes in this 1990 photo taken by Kuwabara Shiseiishika, a Japanese photo journalist, during his trip to the North with the Japanese Socialist Party.

/ Korea Times file

By Kim Young-jin

Despite its isolation, North Korea is on the same page as much of the international community on at least one count ㅡ its mortality rate due to smoking.

According to a report released by the World Health Organization (WHO), the proportion of deaths due to tobacco in the North in men over 30 was nearly 13 percent, while that among women was 11 percent. Globally 12 percent of all deaths are attributed to tobacco.

Smoking is said to be a rising social problem in the North, where 53 percent of men light up on a daily basis, second only to Indonesia in Asia, according to another recent WHO report.

The statistics come despite efforts by Pyongyang to encourage citizens to quit the bad habit by this year, when the country has promised to emerge as a “strong and prosperous” state.

Last month, state television aired a movie in which it depicted male students smoking in secret, discouraging such activity. The problem is said to start at a young age for many North Koreans.

“Many have little to eat and don’t do activities such as sports, so they smoke instead,” An Chan-il, a scholar who defected from the North, said. “Stress is a big factor as well.”

Pyongyang controls the populace with an iron fist and is said to operate an intricate security apparatus including a sprawling political prison system.

But citizens share at least one thing in common with their top leaders: Both late country founder Kim Il-sung and his son the late Kim Jong-il were smokers and reports say current leader Kim Jong-un picked up the habit as a teenager.

Still the Stalinist state has made efforts to decrease the smoking rate, at one point trying to bring it down to 30 percent. In 2005 it enacted a law to restrict smoking and ban advertisements in public places related to smoking.

Direct tobacco smoking kills 5 million worldwide each year with some 600,000 additional people dying from the effects of secondhand smoke the report said.